Free Safety Tests by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 
     
    Safety Tests
    Kristine Kathryn Rusch
     
    Fifteen minutes late, I’m always fifteen minutes late, even though I live not six meters from the office. The nearest door is humble enough, with its cryptic sign: L&R: Employees Only .
    L&R—Licensing and Regulation. Sounds so innocuous, yet everyone is afraid of us.
    With good reason I suppose.
    We’re in the main part of the space station, although intuitively, you’d expect us to be on our own little platform along with our ships. I suspect that back in the days before anyone knew how dangerous L&R could be, the office was near the ships, which were probably docked not too far from here.
    Now we all know that one pilot misstep could destroy an entire section of the station, so the test ships have their own docking platform far away from here. And L&R remains in its original location partly because it’s safer here, and safety is very, very important.
    I step into the office, and take a deep whiff of the bad-coffee smell of the place. It’s almost like home, if a bland white (okay, gray) office with industrial chairs can be home. I say hello to Connie, and put my bag on the back of my chair in the actual office section.
    Connie doesn’t say hello. She never says hello. Just once I’d like a “Nice to see you, Dev” or a “You’re late again, Devlin,” or maybe even a three-finger wave. Or a grunt. I’d be shocked if I ever got a grunt.
    Today she’s leaning over the counter, dealing with whatever stupidity has walked into the waiting room. There’s a lot of stupidity here, which should worry people, since we’re the last stop between them and sheer disaster. But most people never come to our little bureaucracy. They think it’s better to have someone else operate space-faring vehicles. Which, considering the stupidity that walks through our door, stupidity that has already had one year of classwork, five written tests (minimum score: 80%), 500 hours simulation, 300 hours hands-on training with an instructor, and one solo journey that consists mostly of leaving the space station’s test bay, circling the instruction area, returning to the bay, and landing correctly at the same dock the ship had vacated probably ten minutes before, is probably good.
    And that’s just for the student license, the one that allows practice flights solo in areas inhabited by other spacecraft.
    No automation here. There’s too much at stake, too many important decisions, too much that rests on those five-second impressions we get about other people—that feeling This guy is piloting a ship? Reeeally? that you can’t quite describe, but is much more accurate than some computerized test that doesn’t completely get at the complexities of the human emergency response.
    Is it any wonder they call my profession high-burnout? The woman who had this job before me died when an actual pilot—a guy who had done supply runs from Earth to the Moon—decided to get a racer’s permit. He came in at the wrong angle, missed the tester’s dock completely, grazed one of our practice cargo vessels, looped, and somehow shut off the environmental controls—all of them—inside the cockpit. My predecessor somehow couldn’t regain control fast enough. She died horribly, the kind of death none of us want and all of us know is possible.
    Here’s the key to this job: Get paid and get out. Once you’re promoted to my position, you got maybe five years ahead of you. You get paid commensurately—with the amounts going up for each six months that you stay.
    Me, I’ve been at it three years now, and I can feel the wear. That’s probably why I’m always late. I struggle just to get out of the apartment in the morning, wondering what fresh hell awaits me.
    Today’s fresh hell—all six of them—sit in chairs in the waiting room. They clutch a health monitor in one hand, and the small tablet that Connie gives them in the other. They’re told that the tablet will vibrate when it’s their turn,